OPINION: All they want for Christmas is asylum

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Since the beginning of October our country been watching the immigrant caravan making their journey to the US Mexico border seeking refuge. Now they’re sitting in tent cities lined up along the border. America has recently forgotten about this not because it’s no longer a problem anymore, but because the midterm elections are over and this news was used as leverage for Republican candidates. Republicans frequently referred to the election as “the election of the caravan” or “the election of the immigrants”.

It astounds me how inhumane we’ve made it for a group of people seeking safety. Throwing tear gas at them when they haven’t even reached our soil and sending families running in tears? The destination that they dreamed of shouldn’t be what they fear. How can people look at these refugees in disgust, when what they’re doing is only natural. They’re fleeing their corrupt country to educate their children and get a job; just like any of us would in that position.

President Trump continues to make a fool of himself through his impulsive and ungrammatically correct tweets. He posted, “I am watching the Democrat Party-led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws) assault on our country by Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, whose leaders are doing little to stop this large flow of people, INCLUDING MANY CRIMINALS, from entering Mexico to U.S….” This shows that President Trump only used this issue to stimulate the Republican base during the midterm elections. He directly called out the Democrat Party falsely for wanting “open borders and existing weak laws” which is ironically fake news. No elected Democratic official has discussed wanting “open borders” or not improving the laws in place.

President Trump classified this as a national emergency before they were even on our soil and sped up wall construction toward the border. He tweeted, “I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergency”. The border was lined with military soldiers making a fool of our armed forces as this isn’t their job to babysit the border. Legally the military cannot arrest anyone as it is for law enforcement to handle. The military on the border is just an intimidating bluff by our country as they will neither shoot nor arrest these people along the border.

William Banks, an expert on the military’s domestic authorities at Syracuse University, said to Vox News, “If we were attacked by Mexico, we’d be there lawfully,” he told me, “but there’s no justification for it here.”

President Trump conveniently forgets that it is legal to come to our border and ask for asylum. El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua are three of the most violent countries in the world and these people are fleeing for their lives as would many of us. Instead this “ a National Emergency” used for petty tweets and promotion toward elections.